s, slightly akin to the Lady of the
Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough
occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with an
expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four
times a day.

Sympathy! We have seen Honora surrounded by friends--what has become of
them? Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of the
most desirable houses in New York. What more could be wished for? To jump
at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine with an
Ideal. She had these things, and--strange as it may seem--suffered.

Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially
beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was
not taste. Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked back
over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal,
whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The farther
she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of
unrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and which
she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not have
been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene in
a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did not belong
to her, nor she to them.

Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in
looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own:
and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved
stone mantel. The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might
appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Would
not the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and of
many children, and even the 'precieuses ridicules' themselves, turn over
in their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of the
single street in modern New York where Honora lived?

One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical though
painful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it,
absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page.
Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of the
name seemed to quiver and become red. Slowly they spelled--Peter Erwin.

"The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Court
of the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case